NVIDIA's nForce 590 SLI for Intel chipset is similar in many respects to the AMD version of the chipset. There are two chipsets for the Intel platform, the nForce 590 SLI and the nForce 570 SLI chipsets. The 590 SLI is designed for the high-end enthusiast and has a projected MSRP of $150+. The 570 SLI is designed for the Performance market and has a projected MSRP of $130.

nForce 590 Intel Motherboard

The nForce 590 chipset supports all current Intel LGA-775 CPUs including the Core 2 Duo CPUs about to be announced shortly, the 9xx series, the 8xx series and the Core 2 Extreme CPUs. Older Pentium 4 CPUs and Celeron D CPUs are also supported. Intel chipsets have been notorious for requiring new chipsets, to support dual core, to support 64-bit instructions and more. It's nice to see NVIDIA's chipset support for all current Intel CPUs.

nForce 590 7900 SLI - Intel

nForce 590 7950 SLI - Intel

SLI stands for Scalable Link Interface. The idea of two graphics chips working together is not a new idea, as a company called 3DFX was the innovator of multiple GPU systems with the Voodoo 2. Early NVIDIA SLI boards required a "paddle" to turn SLI on or off. The 590 SLI and 570 SLI boards do not require a paddle, just insert the two cards, enable SLI in the NVIDIA Control Panel and you're good to go.

Early SLI motherboards had a maximum of 20 PCI Express lanes. This limited the number of PCI Express lanes for dual graphics cards to 2 X8. Last year, NVIDIA introduced the X16 chipset, allowing for both PCI Express slots to have a full 16 lanes of bandwidth. The nForce 590 supports this as well. The 570 supports 2 X8 lanes and is similar in many respects to the first SLI chipset.

HDA: High Definition Audio

High Definition Audio was introduced by Intel with their 925X chipset in April of 2004. The H.D.A. standard includes support for up to eight channels of 192 kHz/32-bit quality sound, while the previous AC'97 specification supports up to six channels at 48 kHz/20-bit quality. HD Audio also features multi-streaming audio capability andenhanced jack-sensing capabilities. Both the nForce 570 and 590 SLI chipsets support this standard.

FirstPacket allows you to prioritize packets when multiple applications demands bandwidth. For example, when you run a file-sharing protoccol, like BitTorrent, normally it would eat up a lot of bandwidth, lowering your ping times in games. With FirstPacket, you could prioritize the games to get the bandwidth, thereby keeping the pings under control.

DualNet is NVIDIA's trademark for using two Gigabit Ethernet ports in cooperation with each other. Teaming allows the two Ethernet controllers to work together much like a 2 Gigabit connection and share it over a network. There's also a fail safe, so that if one cable or Ethernet controller goes down, the others take up the slack without pause.

MediaShield

MediaShield is NVIDIA's drive technology for hard drives. nForce 590 SLI supports up to 6 SATA devices natively. RAID 0, 0+1, 5, 10 modes. You can make a big Stripped disk from up to 6 SATA devices on the nForce 590 SLI, but on the 570 SLI, 4 is the maximum number of drives supported in that mode. You can also make multiple mirrored drive arrays.

Pricing and Partners

nForce 590SLI

Price:~ $150+

Manufacturers: ASUS, DFI, BioStar, ECS

nForce 570 SLI:

Price:~$130+

Manufacturers: ASUS, Biostar, ECS, Jetway MSI

The list of partners for NVIDIA's launch is rather shorter than their list of AMD partners. I would imagine that companies like Abit, Gigabyte, and EpoX would enter into the market with nForce 590 or 570 motherboards once it's fully into the market. NVIDIA has a small foothold in the Intel market, making this a good choice.